Kjetil Kristoffer Solberg

Linux: ccat

The ccat command I created for Linux – written in Pascal – types files to screen like the cat command does, except it runs the files through a color filter. An example of the output for a small XML file and a small Pascal file is shown below.

In order to try out ccat you first need to do a:


                        git clone https://github.com/sith-ikjetil/ccat.git

Then you need to have the free pascal compiler installed in order to compile the application. You install it on Ubuntu like this:


                        sudo apt install fpc

Then you navigate to the ./ccat/src directory and run the build.sh build script. After the build is finished you have a ccat executable and you can put it in a bin folder that is part of your path. For example /usr/bin or ~/bin if you have your own bin directory in your home directory.

Next you must create a directory in your home folder called .ccat (~/.ccat). Copy all .ccrc files from source directory ./ccat/ccrc/ to this directory.

This is all you need to have files colorized with output. There are now a small number of supported file types with their own color configuration. These are: .arduino, .asm, .c (includes .c, .cpp and .h), .cs, .js, .json, .pascal, .perl, .sh, .text, .xml. If a file does not have a corresponding ccrc file it defaults to the .text color filter file. You can override the ccat command with --syntax=<first name of ccrc filename> if you need to specify the syntax it should use.